REMINISCING – Lt. Eric Hubler, a Hyannis Fire District prevention and safety officer, muses over a 34-year career as a firefighter with the help of a laptop slide show here depicting a photo of Hubler, at right, with Sen. Ted Kennedy, center, and Lt. Don Chase, fellow prevention and safety officer.

Ben Franklin once declared that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Eric Hubler made a career concurring with Franklin, whose written appeals led to the formation of the first “professional” fire department in Philadelphia and possibly the country.

Hubler, at 53, has been a Hyannis Fire District prevention officer, retiring this month as a lieutenant, for a quarter century. He’ll tell you that when he started his career as a call firefighter in Orleans at the tender age of 16, the national average of fire deaths was “roughly 9,000 year. Today, it’s down to about 3,800.”

And if you give him an opportunity to boast by asking whether that significant reduction in fire fatalities stems from better fire prevention and programs, he’ll reach up a hand to adjust his eyeglasses, shift his 6’2” frame, look you straight in the eye and casually say: “No. It’s just that fewer people are smoking cigarettes,” plain and simple. In hindsight, it would appear that falling asleep with or carelessly discarding cigarettes took as many lives as candles and coal embers did in earlier times.

But Hubler doesn’t dismiss prevention programs, more stringent fire codes and better firefighting techniques and equipment also as important contributors to fewer deaths and less structural damage in accidental building fires.

He explains that the Hyannis Fire District gets about 6,000 calls a year in a coverage area of only nine square miles, “and half of that is water and airport,” while about one-third of those calls are fire-related and the rest ambulance runs to accidents and other medical calls.

He cites another statistic, that Hyannis is second in the nation with the number of restaurants per capita, a fact that keeps the district’s two prevention officers very busy conducting safety inspections. “We try to check each restaurant for fire safety at least once a year,” he said, as well as more frequent checks of hospitals, some industries and schools.

“We’ve also been to many, many houses in the village to inspect newly installed oil-fire boilers and oil tank installations,” he said. Gas fired furnaces are checked by town building department inspectors to assure proper installation.

Most of all, as far as prevention goes, he’ll tell you “education” is perhaps most important prevention tool. “In any fire that occurs, you have the opportunity to get the word out on how to prevent it from happening someplace else,” which is why, he says, fire departments place so much importance on public education.

And that begins, as did his career, at an early age. “In Hyannis we (the district’s two fire prevention officers, he and Lt. Don Chase) visit schools a lot to talk about fire prevention in addition to conducting quarterly fire drills and inspections,” he said.

Hubler took to being a firefighter as a teenager in Orleans, where his family had moved from Wellesley to operate a motel. “I was too young to drive a car when I started as a volunteer firefighter, so I used to go racing to fires on my bicycle,” he recalled.

And when high school was in session, he had the distinct privilege of dispensation from the classroom when the town fire alarm wailed its call to action. “The fire station was nearby,” he said. “All I had to do was run across a field from the school to the station.”

For those who might remember, Hubler was the first responder to a near-calamity at Nauset Beach in 1972 when 24 people were caught in a vicious undertow. “My parents’ motel was at the top of the hill from the beach,” he said. “I jumped on my bike with an oxygen tank and first aid kit. When I got there some people were helping others get out of the water and I joined in while a lifeguard used my oxygen tank on people being taken from the water.”

After getting most people from the water to the beach, Hubler joined Coast Guardsmen in a “Duck.” an amphibious vehicle, to search beyond the breakers for more swimmers. Press reports of the day said one woman died and 17 were injured in the riptide event.

While a call firefighter, Hubler began his career in the world of work in the service industry as a front desk manager, in the kitchen until finally achieving his goal to become a permanent firefighter, a job he has held for almost 35 years – 24 of those as prevention officer in the Hyannis Fire District.

“Not many people have a good handle on what we do,” Hubler said, “but it includes inspections, enforcement, investigations, public education, plans review (site plan review), hazardous materials and disaster preparedness in addition to firefighting.”

The prevention officers sit in on the town’s site plan review board that includes the building commissioner, town engineers, health director, and growth management to review site plans for proposed projects in town to help developers achieve a viable, safe and aesthetic site plan.

“On that board,” Hubler said,” our job is to make sure there is room for fire vehicles to reach all parts of a proposed building unhindered and assure convenient and adequate water supply.”

He said the prevention officers also study the actual building plans to assure access and fire codes, such as adequate sprinkler systems, are being met.

“Currently, all new housing over two units require sprinkler systems. We (fire officials nationwide) are lobbying to require them in new one and two-family homes too... while that’s where people are still dying in their own homes.”

In the course of his duties, Hubler has picked up some kudos, such as firefighter of the year for community service award from former Gov. William Weld in 1992; a similar honor from Mothers Against Drunk Driving and a shared citation from President Bill Clinton, the awards the result of the annual Fire Prevention Weekend initiated by Hubler and others at Cape Cod Mall.

He’s also gathered education unto himself during his career and used it to teach others as a long-time member of the State Fire Marshall’s Task Force on Fire/Safety Public Education, a project that rewrites and updates teaching and learning aids on fire prevention and safety used to train firefighters, school teachers and to introduce children to fire prevention and safety.

A graduate of Nauset High School, he acquired a bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in marine transportation and a minor in fisheries science. He also earned an associate’s degree in fire science and safety from Cape Cod Community College and has been an emergency medical technician since 1974.

Hubler, still young, says he has no specific plans other than to “look for another challenge.”

The Hyannis Firefighters Local Union 2172 will bid Hubler adieu, and invites the public to join them at a retirement dinner/event Oct. 25 at the Holiday Inn, 1127 Route 132, Hyannis. More information is available at Hyannis Fire, 508-775-1300.